Guy Standing Quotes

Guy Standing

Profession : Actor

Birth : September 1, 1873

Globalisation, technological change, and the move to flexible labour markets has channelled more and more income to rentiers - those owning financial, physical, or so-called intellectual property - while real wages stagnate.

Guy Standing

Magna Carta only came into being in 1217, when the wording had been changed and parts of the original were extended in the Charter of the Forests. This complementary charter covered liberties granted to the common man, including rights to the commons, grazing, fishing, water, and firewood, and was perhaps the first ecological charter in history.

Guy Standing

Since all political parties blame the others for the economic mess, it is unfair to attribute unemployment to individual behaviour.

Guy Standing

What we can say with confidence is that the technological revolution is worsening inequality, due mostly to mechanisms that limit free markets. It is also bringing about disruptive change that is intensifying insecurity and may indeed lead to large-scale labor displacement.

Guy Standing

Chronic insecurity will not be overcome by minimum wage laws, tax credits, means-tested benefits, or workfare.

Guy Standing

The Latin root of 'precariousness' is 'to obtain by prayer.' The precariat must ask for favours, for charity, to show obsequiousness, to plead with figures of authority. It is degrading and stigmatizing.

Guy Standing

Successive governments in the U.K. have worked to create a more flexible labour market, which also meant labour insecurity. They allowed wages to drop and non-wage benefits to shrivel, creating worse inequality than statistics reveal.

Guy Standing

Every progressive movement has been built on the anger, needs, and aspirations of the emerging major class.

Guy Standing

Globalisation began what should be called the Great Convergence, creating a globalising labour market in which wages in emerging market economies slowly converge with wages in rich economies, generating a steady drop in real wages across Europe.

Guy Standing

The Magna Carta was the first class-based charter, enforced on the monarchy by the rising class.

Guy Standing

Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.

Guy Standing

The precariat is the first class in history to be losing acquired rights - cultural, civil, social, economic, and political.

Guy Standing

Sanctions and workfare make it easier for employers to impose insecure practices on desperate people.

Guy Standing

The precariat consists of a growing proportion of our total society. It is being habituated to accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living. Often they're unable to say what their occupation is, because what they're doing now might be quite different from what they were doing three months ago.

Guy Standing

People in the precariat find themselves in the situation where the level of their education and qualifications is almost always higher than the sort of labour that they're going to be able to obtain.

Guy Standing

People in the precariat rely very heavily on money wages.

Guy Standing

If you're healthier, you tend to have a lower demand for health services.

Guy Standing

The precariat faces chronic uncertainty about what to do, about what incomes to expect, about state benefits that might be their due, about their relationships, their homes, and about the occupations they can realistically expect.

Guy Standing

Across Europe, not just in the U.K., the old Beveridge and Bismarckian variants of the welfare state have been dismantled. In their place has been erected a mish-mash of means-tested, behaviour-tested social assistance, with a growing tendency to force young unemployed into workfare schemes, which are helping to depress real wages.

Guy Standing

Twentieth-century welfare state capitalism was historically unique in that national income was split between wages and profits, labour and capital.

Guy Standing